[lmm]

> This is an entirely new claim - that the Terminal should try to understand what its input means.

I don't see it as a different claim. My position is that the terminal should not move into a bad state for any valid input, and that a state that the user understands as being "broken" is probably a bad state. To my mind this should not require detailed understanding of what each program is doing, which I agree is difficult, but just some more basic things like making it clearer to the user why their terminal is in a funny state (and how to undo it), or perhaps ensuring that the terminal reverts to a good state whenever a program that had changed its state exits.

[tsimionescu]

Having a way to return to the default would be nice, but it wouldn't fix the base problem that a program can't simply print a file name to stdout if it thinks stdout might be connected to a terminal. Even if the terminal didn't "break", it would still not display the file name in a useful way (e.g. a user couldn't copy paste it from there).

[lmm]

> it wouldn't fix the base problem that a program can't simply print a file name to stdout if it thinks stdout might be connected to a terminal. Even if the terminal didn't "break", it would still not display the file name in a useful way (e.g. a user couldn't copy paste it from there).

Well, I'm all for having something like a "raw copy" function in the terminal, but if a filename contains characters that can't reasonably be copy-pasted then there's not really anything that can be done about that (other than "don't give your files silly names"). I think having the terminal get into a bad state is a far worse problem; weird/corrupted filenames are something that happens and people generally figure out a way to deal with them.